For the first time, the company is announcing that it plans to release a new game in the Call of Duty series in 2011 and that Sledgehammer Games, a newly formed, wholly owned studio is in development on a Call of Duty game that will expand the Call of Duty franchise into the action-adventure genre.

Sledgehammer Games is helmed by industry veterans Glen A. Schofield and Michael Condrey. Prior to joining Activision Publishing, Schofield was the Executive Producer of the award-winning game, Dead Space and Michael Condrey was the Sr. Development Director on the game. The Dead Space franchise has won more than 80 industry awards worldwide including the prestigious A.I.A.S. Action Game of the Year and two B.A.F.T.A.S.

While, the Call of Duty business unit will be led by Philip Earl, who currently runs Activision Publishing’s Asia Pacific region and previously served in senior executive positions with Procter & Gamble and Nestle. Activision Publishing veterans Steve Pearce, chief technology officer and Steve Ackrich, head of production, will lead Infinity Ward on an interim basis.

In a press release from Activision, the company has confirmed that Jason West and Vince Zampella are no longer with Infinity Ward. However, the company will not comment as to the reason West and Zampella are no longer with Infinity Ward.

“We’re extremely excited that Google shares our vision for how search can continue to evolve by including social features.” Max Ventilla, Zoo Director, Aardvark said of the acquisition,  “This acquisition represents an incredible opportunity to accelerate this development, working with some of the most amazing folks in the industry to offer a new kind of search to hundreds of millions of people.”

Google Inc. has been working closely with the development team at Aardvark for the past two years to develop a faster and more accurate system. Google Inc. Also noted that they will be developing Aardvark over the next two weeks and months to improve its speed and quality of service to its users. While the transition takes place Google Inc. will be incorporating Aardvark into Google more, providing hundreds of millions of users with on-demand answers to those tricky questions one might have.

If you currently have an account with Aardvark, fear not, all existing accounts will work as normal. If you are interested in using Aardvark, you can do so immediately through Google Labs, and for free.

Once you register, all your questions will be set to private by default, however, you will be able to change this setting to public, once questions are set to public, they will be indexed by Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines.

Additionally, users may sign up here as well and import import either their Facebook or Google account to quickly sign up and start using the service.

Ubuntu Spotlight is a weekly topic that aims the spotlight at applications, themes, and even tips and tricks for the Ubuntu operating system. These articles will be written specifically with novice users in mind, other articles featured will be designed for advanced users. However, don’t let that stop you from gaining the knowledge that these articles will provide.

The articles will be right to the point, they will not be long winded articles but will still give you the know-how to start learning about Ubuntu.

Our “Ubuntu Spotlight” articles will be posted in our forum, be sure to check back often for the latest “Ubuntu Spotlight” articles.

Take a look at our "Ubuntu Spotlight" series

With the release less than two weeks away, retailers across the United States are announcing plans for a midnight launch of Modern Warfare 2. Both Best Buy and Gamestop are planning to open their doors to allow anxious gamers get there hands on the game  as the clock strikes 12 Midnight.

We will of course be at one of the Gamestop midnight launches and will give you complete coverage from the event. Following the event, we will be exclusively on Xbox 360 playing the game and will offer up our thoughts and give you the complete run-down of the game as well as some tips and tricks to help you along the way.

Below you will find the Best Buy and Gamestop lists of store locations that will be opening their doors on Monday, November 9, 2009 in preparation for the midnight launch. For more information and to get directions to a launch event in your area please visit either Best Buy’s Website or Gamestop’s Website for complete details.

Download: Best Buy Store List [XPS] — Gamestop Store List [PDF]

Google said the operating system based off it’s Chrome web browser and will be open source.

Today the company revealed that it is working with a number of OEMs to design and build devices that deliver an extraordinary end user experience. These companies include Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Toshiba.

In addition, as we mentioned yesterday, Google will deliver the code later this year to the open source community.  Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management and Linus Upson, Engineering Director stated in a blog post “We’re looking forward to working with the open source community and making our own small contribution to the great work being done out there.”

Now, Google is set to begin development of a Google Chrome based operating system. The Chrome based operating system will be open source, the company will make the code available later this year. Google plans to offer Google powered netbooks in 2010 and is currently working with OEMs to bring a number netbooks to the market bundled with the new Chrome operating system.

The Chrome operating system is a new project, separate from the company’s Android operating system for Smartphone’s. The Google Chrome operating system will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel.

“For application developers, the web is the platform.” Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management and Linus Upson, Engineering Director said in a blog posting. “Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems.”

The move is ambitious and has wide spread implications not just to consumers but to dominant market leaders Microsoft and Apple. It’s not going to be an easy future for the Google operating system, Microsoft officials claim 96% of netbooks run Windows so penetrating market share will be tough.

Google has not confirmed pricing and availablility yet and the company didn’t mention how it plans to profit from the operating system.

In a separate announcement earlier this week, Google confirmed that it has moved its Google Apps suite out of beta. This was done in an effort to entice businesses to adopt the Google Apps services.

The company launched the Google Apps suite for businesses two years ago and today, the company strips the ‘”beta” tag from Gmail, Calendar, Docs, and Google Talk – their rendition of an Instant Messaging client like Windows Live Messenger, AIM – after a prolonged testing period to ensure the applications meet a high quality bar.

With the removal the “beta” tag, this will remove any doubt that Apps is ready for primetime, and is a mature product suite.

“We’ve come to appreciate that the beta tag just doesn’t fit for large enterprises that aren’t keen to run their business on software that sounds like it’s still in the trial phase. So we’ve focused our efforts on reaching our high bar for taking products out of beta, and all the applications in the Apps suite have now met that mark.” Matthew Glotzbach, Director of Product Management, Google Enterprise said in a blog posting. “Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk — both enterprise and consumer versions — are now out of beta. "Beta" will be removed from the product logos today, but we’ll continue to innovate and improve upon the applications whether or not there’s a small "beta" beneath the logo.”

In addition to moving the Google Apps out of beta, the  company said it has added some features to it’s Google Apps suite.

“We’re also launching a tool that will be particularly useful to administrative support staff to screen and send email on behalf of others – a feature called email delegation. And to help customers comply with regulations that may exist specific to their industry, we’re adding email retention so that IT administrators can set up policies to determine when email will be purged. Both retention and delegation are in testing with customers, and will start rolling out to all Premier edition domains over the next weeks.” Rajen Sheth, Senior Product Manager, Google Apps said in a separate blog posting. “To complement these new features, enterprise IT managers can access tools for switching to Google Apps in our Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes resource centers”

Holiday photos and family details about the newly appointed head of Britain’s MI6 intelligence agency have been removed from a facebook page after a newspaper reported it to government officials.

Pictures from the social networking web site published in the mail on Sunday show John Sawers posing with children, wearing a Santa hat and playing Frisbee on a beach.

The Associated Press stated the information was posted by Sawers’ wife on her Facebook page. The page contained vacation photos, details regarding their children and the location of their London home.

Shelly Sawers’ page has since been removed from Facebook, although a cached page can still be viewed that shows a picture of Sawers’ wife.

"It’s not a state secret that he wears Speedo swimming trunks," said Foreign Secretary David Miliband. "For goodness’ sake, let’s grow up."

The Foreign Office would not comment further on the case.

John Sawers, 53, was named last month as the new head of the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence agency. A former spy, diplomat and foreign policy adviser to ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair, he is currently Britain’s ambassador to the United Nations.

He is due to take up his new post in November.